1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for determining the reliability of components within a computer system.
2. Related Art
Enterprise computer systems often include a large number of hard disk drives. For example, a single server system can sometimes have as many as 48 internal hard disk drives or address over 100 external disk drives in a storage array. Losing data stored on these disk drives can have a devastating effect on an organization. For example, airlines rely on the integrity of data stored in their reservation systems for most of their day-to-day operations, and would essentially cease to function if this data became lost or corrupted. If fault-prone hard disk drives can be identified before they fail, preventative measures can be taken to avoid such failures.
Vibrations often cause disk drives to fail in a computer system. Hence, prior to shipping a computer system to a customer, vibration studies are sometimes performed on the disk drives to identify disk drives that are likely to fail when exposed to vibrations. Presently, the only technique that is used to perform such vibration studies on disk drives involves shaking the drives using a programmable shaker table, which introduces varying amplitudes and frequencies of vibrations to the disk drives. Unfortunately, this process of using a shaker table is time-consuming and expensive.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for generating vibrations within a computer system to test the reliability of disk drives without the problems described above.